Bill Frisell – The Places Where There Are Connections
ND: And yet he’s coming from a totally different place than Barnes, in terms of his background.
BF: Yeah. But still, they both have this wide-open, childlike curiosity about everything, and they haven’t boxed themselves in. And that’s what always attracts me to any other musician, I think. They have their own strong identity, but they’re not thinking, ‘This is the only way.’
ND: So when did you first start working with Greg Leisz?
BF: That’s really recently. I did a couple gigs with Viktor [Krauss] and Jerry Douglas [dobro] about two years ago, and we played in Minneapolis, and that’s where I met Greg. He just came to the gig and someone introduced us. He was in town with k.d. lang. We just started talking, and we had a lot of mutual friends, and he was really cool to talk to. But I didn’t know anything about him. I didn’t think that I’d ever heard him, and then I got home, and I saw, hey, he’s on this record, he’s on that record — it turned out, it seemed like he was on every other record that I’d either bought or had already. It kinda freaked me out; I mean, he’s on so many records, it’s almost easier to name the records that he’s not on.
So I ended up calling him, and we started having these conversations, and he seemed like he really liked what I did. So we had this mutual admiration thing going. And just sorta out of the blue, I asked him to play on Good Dog, Happy Man; that was the first time we played together at all. We hadn’t played a note before that. I just knew from talking to him that if it felt that good personally, it would feel that good musically. And it did….We’ve played a lot since then, and I just really love playing with him.
II. THIS FEELING OF BREATH GOING INTO THE NOTES
ND: You’ve played a little bit of banjo, and you played clarinet when you were younger. At times your guitar playing seems to take on the voice or sound of other instruments.
BF: Yeah, well, in the beginning I was playing the guitar because I heard the Ventures and the Beatles and stuff. But as I got further into it, the music that influenced me most was not coming from the guitar. There was the thing about playing the clarinet, and I’ve always had that — sort of trying to get this feeling of breath going into the notes that I think comes from clarinet. But as soon as I started to get more into jazz, the people that really influenced me the most were saxophone players and piano players, and later on, maybe orchestral music. It never was really guitar. I just happened to play the guitar, but then I’d listen to a string quartet or something, and I’d be hearing that sound in my head and trying to get it out on guitar somehow.
ND: It seems that your recent records are also reflecting more of an interest in song-based forms as opposed to instrumental forms.
BF: Right. Well that’s the other thing — a lot of what I’m doing when I play the guitar, I’m thinking of it like the voice; I want it to be the singer. So I’ve been surrounding myself with a lot of people who are really good at playing with singers. Like when I play with Greg, he knows instinctively what to do to complement what I do. I said earlier that I listened to a lot of horn players and piano players, but I also listened to singers. I’ve tried to copy what singers do, and do that on a guitar. You know, I’ll play an Aretha Franklin song, and I’ll try to play exactly what she sang on a guitar. Or I’ll play a John Hiatt song, and try to play what he sings. So I’ve got these guys that know how to play with singers. And [Jim] Keltner [who played drums on Frisell’s last two records] and Greg are masters at supporting singers. So, yeah, I’ve also been attracted to song-form things. A lot of the tunes I’m writing, they don’t have words, but they’re more song-like stuff.
ND: Does the shift toward song form mean a shift away from improvisation?
BF: Well, the improvisation is still there, and I’m still kind of struggling with how to find the balance. I still thrive on not just playing the song the same way every night; it’s really important for me that it’s always a little bit on edge. But I’m at this point where I definitely haven’t gotten there yet, where I’m trying to find the key to how I could play a Carter Family song and it would still be there, but it would be abstracted in some way. That’s what I have done in the jazz world with, like, an old standard song. The whole thing is to sort of milk new ideas out of a form that you’ve played thousands and thousands of times.
III. IT’S NOT AN INTELLECTUAL THING THAT HAPPENS
ND: Compared to avant garde projects you were involved in such as Naked City or Power Tools, does what you’re doing now seem less experimental?
BF: Oh, for me, it’s way more experimental. It’s like, I had to step back and try to learn how to play ‘Wildwood Flower’. I’d never played that song until just a couple years ago. I played with Jerry Douglas and I said, you wanna play ‘Wildwood Flower’, and he said, ‘Well sure, that’s the first song I ever learned.’ He’s been playing that song since he was a few years old. And that’s not deep-down ingrained in my blood.
But for me, the music that’s really real is something that’s been completely internalized. When you play, it’s not an intellectual thing that happens; it just sort of comes out. And it takes a long time for the stuff to sink down there. So I’m sort of at this weird place of adding a lot of new information — and I’m not gonna ever be able to play like Doc Watson; it’s just too late for me to have this full mass of music coming from a completely deep place. But I still want to understand it.
ND: You still have to be always striving to learn new things, anyway.
BF: Yeah — and then what I’ve also always looked for is these connections between things. Today, things are so compartmentalized; in a record store, there’s all these [categories]; people are always putting people in boxes. …But I love to see those moments where, like, there’ll be a moment on a Bill Monroe record where it sounds exactly like the Duke Ellington Orchestra. I just love when things happen that just fuck up all those boxes.